There is a tension between specialization and keeping your options open. But also, many people are far from the Pareto boundary. For most kids, the alternative to learning chess (or CS or whatever) is watching cartoons, not studying something else.
Specialization has the risk that the entire field may become irrelevant, so it doesn’t matter if you are world’s number 1. Or you may find out one day that you hate the job, but you can’t do anything else.
Polgár made a successful bet. All three of his girls made it to the top. But without the benefit of hindsight, I would say that his strategy was quite risky: suppose the girls instead become “merely” 10th best in their country; now what? -- Perhaps the idea was that they could later switch from chess to something else, and become good-but-not-genius at the other thing.
(Also, the girls were born during socialism, where full employment was the official goal, so not being able to find a job was not an actual risk. Arguably, in socialism it made a lot of sense to become a specialist on something that brings prestige, because the regime would redistribute the money.)
There is a tension between specialization and keeping your options open. But also, many people are far from the Pareto boundary. For most kids, the alternative to learning chess (or CS or whatever) is watching cartoons, not studying something else.
Specialization has the risk that the entire field may become irrelevant, so it doesn’t matter if you are world’s number 1. Or you may find out one day that you hate the job, but you can’t do anything else.
Polgár made a successful bet. All three of his girls made it to the top. But without the benefit of hindsight, I would say that his strategy was quite risky: suppose the girls instead become “merely” 10th best in their country; now what? -- Perhaps the idea was that they could later switch from chess to something else, and become good-but-not-genius at the other thing.
(Also, the girls were born during socialism, where full employment was the official goal, so not being able to find a job was not an actual risk. Arguably, in socialism it made a lot of sense to become a specialist on something that brings prestige, because the regime would redistribute the money.)